Is this another nail in the coffin of paid content on the internet?
As long as Danni's Hard Drive is around, I'd say not.
Did you want to qualify that as "paid news content"? Since the free stuff is BS I'd pay to get them to just print the facts sans op-ed slanted writing.
to keep a copy of every forked distro with source and commentary on same going back to the beginning and onward for at least the next five... minutes. Too bad most of my floppies are history. Anyone still got a complete set of Yggdrasil files?
I always thought that if I could develop a high frequency gravity wave generator capable of making the university detectors respond, I'd modulate it to the Macarena and see how long it took for someone to notice that it wasn't a message from ETs.
I will believe it when I hear a voice telling me we're reaching normality in "three, two, one..." and a seriously depressed robot comes to speak with me about an ongoing pain in his diodes.
This is much more entertaining if you picture TMM as Dana Carvey doing McLaughlin gone nuts.
That being said, fark knows. We rarely see full texts of these things put to us with what is in there made clear and it's common for congressional staffers to flatly state something is in a bill whether or not they've bothered to read it or even if they haven't been in the same building with a hardcopy.
Nevertheless, we should remain vigilant. These people are paranoid delusional and convinced that their IP rights supercede your right to do with your electronic equipment what you will. The broadcast flag, Kinko's dimb bulbs refusing to make copies for kids doing school reports, all of this is in the same vein: lack of understanding of copyrights, trademarks, and patents as they were intended, as the statutory laws (not court precedence) were constructed, and as they relate to the true nature of information. The most dangerous people to our rights are idiots with influence and money.
...they'd be impervious to break-in even by a SWAT team backed up with a tank. Doors and windows with locks suffice. But they are not at all resistant to break-in with the most minor of tools as latchkey kids with a coat hanger prove all across America constantly to their parents.
The point is that your system is yours, no different from your home and there is the tacit understanding that no one sees of your home but the facade you put out for them to see. The inside is your own, what your keep there is your own, and no one has the right to invade it. Hackers are no different than misbehaving teen goons who break into homes to mess around and prove they can do it if not to actually vandalize and steal.
We should treat them no differently and those geeks who sympathize with them and in many cases wish they could be them need to stop and understand that their civil rights are everyones' civil rights. If you don't think people have the right to go through your stuff at will without your permission, others have that same right too and those who won't respect those rights need to be punished by society if we're going to keep those rights. Apathy by the masses with regard to their privacy and the privacy of others is guaranteed to destroy their privacy forever.
Mere decency and mutual respect should be enough. Sad that it isn't.
I second this sentiment. I install Flash on every Linux box I build as part of the initial work and would put Shockwave on it if Macromedia bothered porting it properly. If Microsoft ported Active X to Linux I'd install that too. Sometimes I think some people use Linux as a way of avoiding learning competent administration of Windows, where I don't have problems with any of the above or Java and Javscript. News, er, flash, people. If Linux wants to make inroads against Windows, it needs the glitzy flash and sizzle that people expect, and it is the techie's job to secure it.
I also think too that many people don't have a proper sense of humor and seem to go way out of their way to miss the point. That was fall down funny stuff.
...the noise of the RIAA people grows inversely to the level of actual theft. I have no doubt the MPAA and their ilk would also do the same if bandwidth averages were higher more commonly and a video equivalent to iTunes came about as successful.
Around about the time that 95% of all music sales are download based and CDs becoming a special order item for all but the top twenty, I expect them to be pressing congress for a law banning all audio recording devices without a license, and all devices to mandatorily include fourteen layers of 2048-bit DRM encryption.
Now is not the time to back down and sit there grinning people. Pressure from all angles must be maintained. I'm doing my part on the opt-out side and not buying a single damn CD until they cry uncle. You iPod people, keep jamming. P2P people, keep it up. Remember, reality is not an issue here. Their take on the situation is delusional and the more that reality presses them, the better their crack up is going to be.
We have no supervillains and we aren't awash in the kind of crime it would take to support this so you need to add the cost of creating an enemy to fight in the first place.
The crime would be more lucretive until the government came after you essentially because they don't like competition in crime (not crime fighting, they rarely do this much it seems where I live).
...as most people out there aren't used to that kind of power, but then most programmers aren't used to coding for that kind of set-up either.
I can see SMPs with dual or quad cores per processor, but I can also see the industrial air conditioners needed to cool them.
Nice, but I'd really prefer to see them work on modularity, interoperability, and advancing and not following. SMP Windows workstations can be had for about what they are charging for these multiprocessor Macs and such were being used in 3D work back when the Mac had no real 3D app platform to speak of so this is nothing new to me. New to Mac people, but not Wintel people.
Consider that the average user is willfully clueless with their machines and software. Consider just how much. Now imagine AOL throwing their resources at a tight, polished, bootable AOL-ified Linux which they push on all those CDs.
Linux will continue to move places in the techie arena like with workstations and servers. End users who can't grok Windows? No, not until it gets polished.
So from that perspective, Linus is right that Microsoft isn't just going away. Are they going to continue to have share eaten in serverspace? Yes. Not going away though.
Overall very good replies by Linus, one billionth the level of intensity of the zealots who squak the most in the Linux world which is reassuring. I do think he's wrong that there won't be future Microsofts. There's plenty of innovations in tech to be made that one really lucky company may corner the market through sheer chance and idiocy of their competitors. Microsoft won where Apple, IBM, SCO, Oracle, Netscape, and Sun failed to take them down in various areas despite throwing massive energy into it. It could happen again.
If you want something like a Linux mainframe, wait till the mobo makers finally realize that getting in on the ATCA/cPCI blade server market at the low end, creating much less expensive systems that make efficient cluster servers in a box, is a good thing. Maybe a couple more years till we see it. I would love to be able to put one master board in and four or five drones in, an OpenSSI/K12LTSP server installation, and have powerful upgradeable central administration of hardware and software. I don't need IBM for that. I need Tyan, Asus, and so on to get on with it.
To me, HP is a middleman doing anything profitable, while IBM sticks to one thing and tries to do it well.
And like a lazy underachiever who delusionally thinks himself a contender, they fail miserably at that thing.
I don't know why people assign so much weight to IBM's presence in the Linux world. Does Linux have Token Ring support? Does it play well with OS/2? Do we care? From another angle, what are they exactly doing that will contribute to the spread of Linux? Putting it on desktops where it will lose to Windows because they haven't wielded their magical corporate wand to make it enduser-friendly and efficient? Getting it on server farms which already have ten dozen distros running? Making it work on mainframes where they already have stable operating systems which do serious critical work at transaction levels that Windows and Unix can't touch which is like putting generic motor oil of the wrong weight in an Indy race car?
What worries me is that they will jump ahead of the Linux world with Avalanche and combine it with Windows Update and cause all sorts of patches and updates to be flitting about from node to node, possibly getting infected, code being changed, etc.
To picture this for you Linux people, imagine if someone combined rpm/apt-get/yum/tarballs with BitTorrent. Just connect up, jump into the data stream, and fark knows what is now going to end up on your machine. Just trust us. I wouldn't trust files from the wrong build repository on Fedora, I wouldn't trust files sent by any Microsoft product any more than I would executables via eMule/aMule.
For those joining us from overseas and parts West, Greenwich, Connecticut is among the more -- what's the word? -- 'tony' of digs. Sort of like a Beverly Hills for the New York glitter- and media-rati who don't like the feel of sand between their toes out in the Hamptons.
Generically, Greenwich is one of about 169 municipalities in the state of CT.
Specifically, it has become overrun with the sort of rich people that give rich people a bad name. The sort of charicatures that leftists and arachists always speak of. Snotty, snobbish, self-important, "do-you-know-who-I-am?!" types. The town is firmly in the political hands of these people and the police could care less if you're a renter in an apartment on the main drag (they exist, more of them closer to the NY border), but if you live in places like Belle Haven, they are practically your private soldiers. I used to be harassed by their police as "not looking like" I "belong here" every single night I had third shift maintenance to do on a telecom co-location. Corporate van, uniform, badge, cell phone, manager's contact info, and they still insinuated I looked like I shouldn't be there.
I would take claims of their PD doing racial/ethnic/economic profiling as a given.
I used to work in broadband/telecom down there and when they make impossible demands on "the help" they aren't mere stupid common users. They already pointedly KNOW what they are asking for is improper, they simply expect the laws of physics and reality to be bent for their benefit on their command.
I lost count of the times I was asked to enter through "the servant's entrance" when working there.
You can say this is too harsh, but unless you've experienced the insulting and condescending stares and words from these people yourself, you have no idea. The worst part is, they absolutely do not care about dispelling this image and work very hard to reinforce it.
And are they really this paranoid? Yes. I've been to homes where I was escorted by paid security guards from the front gates through the building and was pointedly told not to look in certain directions. They actually thought they could continue their personal activities in the house right in front of visiting technicians, and MAKE the technician not look in certain directions as if a horse wearing blinders. Several homes even had their man friday duct tape sheets over alarm panels and sensors around the house so I wouldn't see them and thus be able to break in later with that knowledge.
That's what outsiders need to know. If you want examples of really horrendously crazy paranoid snobs like something out of Caddyshack, Greennwich is your place to look.
I live in CT and have worked in Greenwich. They live in another dimension of reality there, entirely contained in their heads. They don't act as though they believe themselves to be part of CT, they have police preventing access to taxpayer funded town owned roads because they don't want commoners going near the wealthy and famous, and have the state's largest concentration of arrogant self-important snobs outside of the Avon-Simsbury region.
If the other 168 municipalities have to be wide open to publicly availible taxpayer funded satellite scans then so should they. I have a feeling however that they will keep on fighting this decision until Hell freezes over.
CAUTION: this can lead to forking into high maintenance distributions with little to no documentation and a tendency to cause forking into further high maintenance distributions before end of life. Said distros may result in severe stress for their administrators and cause feelings of depression and anger. Administrators may be tempted to chroot all things of these distros and the distros will most likely circumvent all measures taken, displaying almost intelligent qualities as they move around from place to place on their own.
We don't have "D Notice" situations here. Hence why you have things like the Iran-Contra scandal, military cost overrun scandals, etc. There's no scandal if the information can be suppressed by fiat and the suppression enforced. We Yanks have no such suppression and the fact that the loudest anti-American FUD ranting comes from America itself is glaring proof.
The loudest continuous screams of censorship must by definition come from those who are not actually being censored, else their claims of censorship would be... (drum roll) censored.
In space, no one can hear you yelling that you can't breathe.
Not a flame here. I want to know. Show us solid examples of this happening on an every day basis and not of foreign nationals without clearance to be here, people who violated the terms of their visas, etc. Show where a natural born American citizen who has not been engaged in terrorism or linked to it has been sent to Guantanamo.
Pure FUD. If it weren't, you would not have been allowed to make your post and have been arrested and sent off to some mythical gulag by now.
I suggest calming down and getting a grip. BTW, for those of you who are in tinfoil hat FUD land, Microsoft isn't sending people in black helicopters to install Windows on your Linux boxes either.
The volume of dissent and paranoid fear mongering is inversely proportional to the level of civil rights in any given place. IOW, you don't hear this talk in Vietnam, because they'd shoot you in the head and be done with it before you spat out more than a few sentences.
Until the anti-DMCA side is willing to accept a law that reinforces the standard copyright laws in a REASONABLE manner, there's very little chance that the DMCA is going away.
Not to Godwin this, or to put too fine a point on it, but this is like the Nazis saying they'll be reasonable if only their targets will wear little stars.
YOU CANNOT BE REASONABLE WITH UNREASONABLE PEOPLE
The RIAA and MPAA are exactly that: intractably unreasonable. We have DECADES of evidence right from their leaders' mouths documenting this clearly. These are people who believe the advent of the 8-track and then casette recorders were very very bad and dangerous ideas that played into mankind's original sin and gave him tools that he might be a thief. The VCR was a tool of bad nasty people who would steal money from the mouth of Steven Spielberg.
You cannot begin to overestimate or overstate their lunatic idiocy. There is NO such thing as fair use for these people, they have NO concept of technology as it applies to demographics of adoption and usage and methods of applying technology to making proft, despite Apple's runaway success at putting iTunes to the public, and they have NO interest in listening to reason.
Compromise? When they agree publicly that copyright was not ever intended and should not ever be used as a tool of permanent monopoly over ideas and expression of same by any organization, when they publicly apologize for suing CHILDREN for piracy, when they admit publicly that THERE IS such a thing as FAIR USE. I put this at the same chance of happening as flying pig racing becoming the newest prime time sport show.
Personally, I say anyone who shills for them should have their entire catalog of publicly availible IP pirated and spread around to as many places as possible in a show of defiance. They need to learn that they WILL lose this war with the public and that we WILL defy them until they wave the white flag, smell the coffee, grow up, and get with the present day.
Notice I didn't say that their IP needed to be exprienced, just copied. I wouldn't listen to Motley Crue or Metallica if you paid me and I've never had the slightest interest in downloading one of their songs. But I would do it just to send a message.
Until then, they give no quarter, we give them none. They aren't desperate. They're greedy and stupid. If I was a pop musician relying on these people to keep me in the money, I'd get my head checked, fire these fools, and adopt a strategy that was in sync with the year 2005 and not 1955.
You are in a dark place. You are likely to be eaten by a spammer.
I am totally failing to see the point of this except for people who want to dare a shave from Occam's Razor and introduce more chance of user input error, waste time getting away from what average users want and need, and just generally engage in more geekery.
...I can finally go back on a nostalgia trip and see my high school reports again... Oh, that's right, the old 5.25" floppies decayed, their domains flipped, and mildew began eating them YEARS ago.
Guess I'll have to settle for sifting floppies from 1995...
A better thing to learn from retro would be cartridges. If the chip makers packeged them with a cooling and fan assembly in a cartridge you just shoved into a slot on the board, they'd take up less space and leave more for making motherboards SMPs by default. They could even have a metal backplane with cooling channels and inlet and outlet ports for hooking to water cooling systems.
Heck, take a page from single board computers and pack most of the needed parts into a modular cartridge and let us build inexpensive cluster servers for our homes. We want more power so the kids can play games, we shell out for another processor cartridge. Modularity of the sort we used to have with some systems is something we badly need given that the average user finds themselves stymied by the maze of cabling in even the best assembled PCs these days.
Slashdot Mirror
With suitable proxies, you can make Lynx look like Internet Explorer. Of course the wrong service pack will make Internet Explorer behave like Lynx.
Is this another nail in the coffin of paid content on the internet?
As long as Danni's Hard Drive is around, I'd say not.
Did you want to qualify that as "paid news content"? Since the free stuff is BS I'd pay to get them to just print the facts sans op-ed slanted writing.
Who cares? TuxRacer can now put me in an inescapable position inside a solid object on the course in 0.2 seconds now.
to keep a copy of every forked distro with source and commentary on same going back to the beginning and onward for at least the next five... minutes. Too bad most of my floppies are history. Anyone still got a complete set of Yggdrasil files?
I always thought that if I could develop a high frequency gravity wave generator capable of making the university detectors respond, I'd modulate it to the Macarena and see how long it took for someone to notice that it wasn't a message from ETs.
I will believe it when I hear a voice telling me we're reaching normality in "three, two, one..." and a seriously depressed robot comes to speak with me about an ongoing pain in his diodes.
This is much more entertaining if you picture TMM as Dana Carvey doing McLaughlin gone nuts.
That being said, fark knows. We rarely see full texts of these things put to us with what is in there made clear and it's common for congressional staffers to flatly state something is in a bill whether or not they've bothered to read it or even if they haven't been in the same building with a hardcopy.
Nevertheless, we should remain vigilant. These people are paranoid delusional and convinced that their IP rights supercede your right to do with your electronic equipment what you will. The broadcast flag, Kinko's dimb bulbs refusing to make copies for kids doing school reports, all of this is in the same vein: lack of understanding of copyrights, trademarks, and patents as they were intended, as the statutory laws (not court precedence) were constructed, and as they relate to the true nature of information. The most dangerous people to our rights are idiots with influence and money.
...they'd be impervious to break-in even by a SWAT team backed up with a tank. Doors and windows with locks suffice. But they are not at all resistant to break-in with the most minor of tools as latchkey kids with a coat hanger prove all across America constantly to their parents.
The point is that your system is yours, no different from your home and there is the tacit understanding that no one sees of your home but the facade you put out for them to see. The inside is your own, what your keep there is your own, and no one has the right to invade it. Hackers are no different than misbehaving teen goons who break into homes to mess around and prove they can do it if not to actually vandalize and steal.
We should treat them no differently and those geeks who sympathize with them and in many cases wish they could be them need to stop and understand that their civil rights are everyones' civil rights. If you don't think people have the right to go through your stuff at will without your permission, others have that same right too and those who won't respect those rights need to be punished by society if we're going to keep those rights. Apathy by the masses with regard to their privacy and the privacy of others is guaranteed to destroy their privacy forever.
Mere decency and mutual respect should be enough. Sad that it isn't.
I second this sentiment. I install Flash on every Linux box I build as part of the initial work and would put Shockwave on it if Macromedia bothered porting it properly. If Microsoft ported Active X to Linux I'd install that too. Sometimes I think some people use Linux as a way of avoiding learning competent administration of Windows, where I don't have problems with any of the above or Java and Javscript. News, er, flash, people. If Linux wants to make inroads against Windows, it needs the glitzy flash and sizzle that people expect, and it is the techie's job to secure it.
I also think too that many people don't have a proper sense of humor and seem to go way out of their way to miss the point. That was fall down funny stuff.
...the noise of the RIAA people grows inversely to the level of actual theft. I have no doubt the MPAA and their ilk would also do the same if bandwidth averages were higher more commonly and a video equivalent to iTunes came about as successful.
Around about the time that 95% of all music sales are download based and CDs becoming a special order item for all but the top twenty, I expect them to be pressing congress for a law banning all audio recording devices without a license, and all devices to mandatorily include fourteen layers of 2048-bit DRM encryption.
Now is not the time to back down and sit there grinning people. Pressure from all angles must be maintained. I'm doing my part on the opt-out side and not buying a single damn CD until they cry uncle. You iPod people, keep jamming. P2P people, keep it up. Remember, reality is not an issue here. Their take on the situation is delusional and the more that reality presses them, the better their crack up is going to be.
We have no supervillains and we aren't awash in the kind of crime it would take to support this so you need to add the cost of creating an enemy to fight in the first place.
The crime would be more lucretive until the government came after you essentially because they don't like competition in crime (not crime fighting, they rarely do this much it seems where I live).
...as most people out there aren't used to that kind of power, but then most programmers aren't used to coding for that kind of set-up either.
I can see SMPs with dual or quad cores per processor, but I can also see the industrial air conditioners needed to cool them.
Nice, but I'd really prefer to see them work on modularity, interoperability, and advancing and not following. SMP Windows workstations can be had for about what they are charging for these multiprocessor Macs and such were being used in 3D work back when the Mac had no real 3D app platform to speak of so this is nothing new to me. New to Mac people, but not Wintel people.
Consider that the average user is willfully clueless with their machines and software. Consider just how much. Now imagine AOL throwing their resources at a tight, polished, bootable AOL-ified Linux which they push on all those CDs.
Linux will continue to move places in the techie arena like with workstations and servers. End users who can't grok Windows? No, not until it gets polished.
So from that perspective, Linus is right that Microsoft isn't just going away. Are they going to continue to have share eaten in serverspace? Yes. Not going away though.
Overall very good replies by Linus, one billionth the level of intensity of the zealots who squak the most in the Linux world which is reassuring. I do think he's wrong that there won't be future Microsofts. There's plenty of innovations in tech to be made that one really lucky company may corner the market through sheer chance and idiocy of their competitors. Microsoft won where Apple, IBM, SCO, Oracle, Netscape, and Sun failed to take them down in various areas despite throwing massive energy into it. It could happen again.
If you want something like a Linux mainframe, wait till the mobo makers finally realize that getting in on the ATCA/cPCI blade server market at the low end, creating much less expensive systems that make efficient cluster servers in a box, is a good thing. Maybe a couple more years till we see it. I would love to be able to put one master board in and four or five drones in, an OpenSSI/K12LTSP server installation, and have powerful upgradeable central administration of hardware and software. I don't need IBM for that. I need Tyan, Asus, and so on to get on with it.
To me, HP is a middleman doing anything profitable, while IBM sticks to one thing and tries to do it well.
And like a lazy underachiever who delusionally thinks himself a contender, they fail miserably at that thing.
I don't know why people assign so much weight to IBM's presence in the Linux world. Does Linux have Token Ring support? Does it play well with OS/2? Do we care? From another angle, what are they exactly doing that will contribute to the spread of Linux? Putting it on desktops where it will lose to Windows because they haven't wielded their magical corporate wand to make it enduser-friendly and efficient? Getting it on server farms which already have ten dozen distros running? Making it work on mainframes where they already have stable operating systems which do serious critical work at transaction levels that Windows and Unix can't touch which is like putting generic motor oil of the wrong weight in an Indy race car?
I really am confused by this phenomenon...
You think so? Wait till those CDs are bootable with something called AOLIX.
What worries me is that they will jump ahead of the Linux world with Avalanche and combine it with Windows Update and cause all sorts of patches and updates to be flitting about from node to node, possibly getting infected, code being changed, etc.
To picture this for you Linux people, imagine if someone combined rpm/apt-get/yum/tarballs with BitTorrent. Just connect up, jump into the data stream, and fark knows what is now going to end up on your machine. Just trust us. I wouldn't trust files from the wrong build repository on Fedora, I wouldn't trust files sent by any Microsoft product any more than I would executables via eMule/aMule.
For those joining us from overseas and parts West, Greenwich, Connecticut is among the more -- what's the word? -- 'tony' of digs. Sort of like a Beverly Hills for the New York glitter- and media-rati who don't like the feel of sand between their toes out in the Hamptons.
Generically, Greenwich is one of about 169 municipalities in the state of CT.
Specifically, it has become overrun with the sort of rich people that give rich people a bad name. The sort of charicatures that leftists and arachists always speak of. Snotty, snobbish, self-important, "do-you-know-who-I-am?!" types. The town is firmly in the political hands of these people and the police could care less if you're a renter in an apartment on the main drag (they exist, more of them closer to the NY border), but if you live in places like Belle Haven, they are practically your private soldiers. I used to be harassed by their police as "not looking like" I "belong here" every single night I had third shift maintenance to do on a telecom co-location. Corporate van, uniform, badge, cell phone, manager's contact info, and they still insinuated I looked like I shouldn't be there.
I would take claims of their PD doing racial/ethnic/economic profiling as a given.
I used to work in broadband/telecom down there and when they make impossible demands on "the help" they aren't mere stupid common users. They already pointedly KNOW what they are asking for is improper, they simply expect the laws of physics and reality to be bent for their benefit on their command.
I lost count of the times I was asked to enter through "the servant's entrance" when working there.
You can say this is too harsh, but unless you've experienced the insulting and condescending stares and words from these people yourself, you have no idea. The worst part is, they absolutely do not care about dispelling this image and work very hard to reinforce it.
And are they really this paranoid? Yes. I've been to homes where I was escorted by paid security guards from the front gates through the building and was pointedly told not to look in certain directions. They actually thought they could continue their personal activities in the house right in front of visiting technicians, and MAKE the technician not look in certain directions as if a horse wearing blinders. Several homes even had their man friday duct tape sheets over alarm panels and sensors around the house so I wouldn't see them and thus be able to break in later with that knowledge.
That's what outsiders need to know. If you want examples of really horrendously crazy paranoid snobs like something out of Caddyshack, Greennwich is your place to look.
I live in CT and have worked in Greenwich. They live in another dimension of reality there, entirely contained in their heads. They don't act as though they believe themselves to be part of CT, they have police preventing access to taxpayer funded town owned roads because they don't want commoners going near the wealthy and famous, and have the state's largest concentration of arrogant self-important snobs outside of the Avon-Simsbury region.
If the other 168 municipalities have to be wide open to publicly availible taxpayer funded satellite scans then so should they. I have a feeling however that they will keep on fighting this decision until Hell freezes over.
CAUTION: this can lead to forking into high maintenance distributions with little to no documentation and a tendency to cause forking into further high maintenance distributions before end of life. Said distros may result in severe stress for their administrators and cause feelings of depression and anger. Administrators may be tempted to chroot all things of these distros and the distros will most likely circumvent all measures taken, displaying almost intelligent qualities as they move around from place to place on their own.
We don't have "D Notice" situations here. Hence why you have things like the Iran-Contra scandal, military cost overrun scandals, etc. There's no scandal if the information can be suppressed by fiat and the suppression enforced. We Yanks have no such suppression and the fact that the loudest anti-American FUD ranting comes from America itself is glaring proof.
The loudest continuous screams of censorship must by definition come from those who are not actually being censored, else their claims of censorship would be... (drum roll) censored.
In space, no one can hear you yelling that you can't breathe.
Not a flame here. I want to know. Show us solid examples of this happening on an every day basis and not of foreign nationals without clearance to be here, people who violated the terms of their visas, etc. Show where a natural born American citizen who has not been engaged in terrorism or linked to it has been sent to Guantanamo.
Pure FUD. If it weren't, you would not have been allowed to make your post and have been arrested and sent off to some mythical gulag by now.
I suggest calming down and getting a grip. BTW, for those of you who are in tinfoil hat FUD land, Microsoft isn't sending people in black helicopters to install Windows on your Linux boxes either.
The volume of dissent and paranoid fear mongering is inversely proportional to the level of civil rights in any given place. IOW, you don't hear this talk in Vietnam, because they'd shoot you in the head and be done with it before you spat out more than a few sentences.
Until the anti-DMCA side is willing to accept a law that reinforces the standard copyright laws in a REASONABLE manner, there's very little chance that the DMCA is going away.
Not to Godwin this, or to put too fine a point on it, but this is like the Nazis saying they'll be reasonable if only their targets will wear little stars.
YOU CANNOT BE REASONABLE WITH UNREASONABLE PEOPLE
The RIAA and MPAA are exactly that: intractably unreasonable. We have DECADES of evidence right from their leaders' mouths documenting this clearly. These are people who believe the advent of the 8-track and then casette recorders were very very bad and dangerous ideas that played into mankind's original sin and gave him tools that he might be a thief. The VCR was a tool of bad nasty people who would steal money from the mouth of Steven Spielberg.
You cannot begin to overestimate or overstate their lunatic idiocy. There is NO such thing as fair use for these people, they have NO concept of technology as it applies to demographics of adoption and usage and methods of applying technology to making proft, despite Apple's runaway success at putting iTunes to the public, and they have NO interest in listening to reason.
Compromise? When they agree publicly that copyright was not ever intended and should not ever be used as a tool of permanent monopoly over ideas and expression of same by any organization, when they publicly apologize for suing CHILDREN for piracy, when they admit publicly that THERE IS such a thing as FAIR USE. I put this at the same chance of happening as flying pig racing becoming the newest prime time sport show.
Personally, I say anyone who shills for them should have their entire catalog of publicly availible IP pirated and spread around to as many places as possible in a show of defiance. They need to learn that they WILL lose this war with the public and that we WILL defy them until they wave the white flag, smell the coffee, grow up, and get with the present day.
Notice I didn't say that their IP needed to be exprienced, just copied. I wouldn't listen to Motley Crue or Metallica if you paid me and I've never had the slightest interest in downloading one of their songs. But I would do it just to send a message.
Until then, they give no quarter, we give them none. They aren't desperate. They're greedy and stupid. If I was a pop musician relying on these people to keep me in the money, I'd get my head checked, fire these fools, and adopt a strategy that was in sync with the year 2005 and not 1955.
You are in a dark place. You are likely to be eaten by a spammer.
I am totally failing to see the point of this except for people who want to dare a shave from Occam's Razor and introduce more chance of user input error, waste time getting away from what average users want and need, and just generally engage in more geekery.
Wouldn't Lynx be easier?
...I can finally go back on a nostalgia trip and see my high school reports again... Oh, that's right, the old 5.25" floppies decayed, their domains flipped, and mildew began eating them YEARS ago.
Guess I'll have to settle for sifting floppies from 1995...
A better thing to learn from retro would be cartridges. If the chip makers packeged them with a cooling and fan assembly in a cartridge you just shoved into a slot on the board, they'd take up less space and leave more for making motherboards SMPs by default. They could even have a metal backplane with cooling channels and inlet and outlet ports for hooking to water cooling systems.
Heck, take a page from single board computers and pack most of the needed parts into a modular cartridge and let us build inexpensive cluster servers for our homes. We want more power so the kids can play games, we shell out for another processor cartridge. Modularity of the sort we used to have with some systems is something we badly need given that the average user finds themselves stymied by the maze of cabling in even the best assembled PCs these days.